This application relates to optical resonators and cavities.
A dielectric material may be shaped to construct an optical whispering-gallery-mode (“WGM”) resonator which supports one or more whispering gallery (“WG”) modes. These WG modes represent optical fields confined in an interior region close to the surface of the resonator due to the total internal reflection at the boundary. For example, microspheres with diameters from few tens of microns to several hundreds of microns have been used to form compact optical WGM resonators. Such a spherical resonator can include at least a portion of the sphere that comprises the sphere's equator. The resonator dimension is generally much larger than the wavelength of light so that the optical loss due to the finite curvature of the resonators is small. As a result, a high quality factor, Q, may be achieved in such resonators. Some microspheres with sub-millimeter dimensions have been demonstrated to exhibit very high quality factors for light waves, ranging from 103 to 109 for quartz microspheres. Hence, optical energy, once coupled into a whispering gallery mode, can circulate within the WGM resonator with a long photon life time. Such hi-Q WGM resonators may be used in many optical applications, including optical filtering, optical delay, optical sensing, lasers, and opto-electronic oscillators.